Wanted: Domain Appraisal Brandable caught bike name, thoughts?

[Systreg]

Thoughts on this brandable domain caught for me by Monaghan yesterday:

b i c y c l e n e t dot c o dot u k (pre reg date 1999)

It's had a bike site on it since 1999 and has backlinks, it used to be a high street bike shop and obviously selling online as well, it's recently a dissolved company. I spotted that their site is still online via an IP address at Online bicycle shop, so possibly some traffic to come from there as the domain url is on each page.

What do you reckon on value as a domain alone? I'll stick a new store on it very soon as there should hopefully be some traffic heading it's way, but I'm open to any good offers before a store goes on it.

 

[accelerator]

It's fine for a catch but I would have got much more excited about bicycle.net.

Rgds

 

[Systreg]

Yeah, bicycle.net would have been better, or bicycle.co.uk, but they're not dropping I think I'll stick a store on this one in a few minutes anyway.

 

[Systreg]

Seeing good early results for this, there have been 49 uniques since putting a store on the domain late last night, and it's had it's first sale already

Someone visited a backlink called b i c y c l e n e t . c o . u k /how _ to _ dete rmine _ your _ bike _ size . h t m and that url goes to my store homepage, clicked one of my AW Halfords links and bought a £599.99 bike earning £9 commission

I must stick some bike sizing charts on the store today as there are a few backlinks to the domain for the bike size link, will add some other relevant bike buying infornation as well. There are some high ranking authority bike/other sites linking to my domain url, so that should increase the serps ranking and PR once mine gets indexed again.

[edit]

Also been thinking about starting a biking forum as I get around 15,000 uniques across my stores each month now, so it might be a good launchpad for a forum. Got a few domains recently for that purpose in mountainbikingforum.co.uk - mountainbikingforums.co.uk and mountainbikeforum.co.uk regged today.

 

[Systreg]

@ Sean, yes, all Halfords sales are 6%, but on this occasion the buyer chose the "reserve & collect" option, which only pays 1.5%.

It really annoys me, because I get messages from Halfords on the Affiliate Window control panel where they ask you to push their reserve & collect option to customers on your stores. It's says something along the lines of, increase your earnings potential with our reserve & collect feature blah blah blah, actually trying to get you to push that option to your customers where it pays 1.5%, now why would anyone want to push that when normal sales are 6%

On the plus side, over all the months, I've only had one sale before where a buyer chose the reserve & collect option, so it's no big deal to get the odd one every now and again, 99.9% are the usual 6% sales.

 

[doodlebug]

Am I wrong to find £9 commission for a £600 bike an insult? 1.5% commission?

Hello Kev,

1.5% is low but hey £9 is £9 for a bike someone would have bought anyway wether you got £9 or not

Good to see you didn't give up on domaining and affiliates, i've not been around much for the last 4 months and didn't who was still on.

Good luck with your future sales mate

 

[Systreg]

Hey Doodle,

Good to see you around again matey, looks like we were posting at the same time above. What you been up to, you not domaining as much these days?

Yeah, at the end of the day, £9 is £9, would have been £36 hand they not chose to collect it, thankfully the collect sales are pretty rare, then again, even if you were to make 20 of the lesser 1.5% sales per week on high priced bikes, that's a fair whack of commission, still, a sale and money made either way

 

[doodlebug]

Hiya mate,

Had some serious crap to deal with in life which made made me quite ill, i'm slowly getting it sorted and things are looking positive.

The breaks give me a chance to look at life and decide what i want and in September i'm definetly going to college to study web design, i'm crap at making websites at the moment, i've decided to make a living through domaining and affiliates, i'm going to build up some decent reg fee domains in .co.uk and .com and store them for future sales, i've stopped parking and only going to put domains up as white label etc till a few years and then sell.

Hope you've made enough money to treat yourself with, hows the 491 site doing and are you still cycling yourself these days ?

Cheers Andy